Last Call - A Thriller (Jacqueline Jack Daniels Mysteries Book 10)

by J. A. Konrath

  Phin tucked the gun into the back of his jeans, located the button to pop the trunk, and got out of the car. The cholos on the corner gave him a glance, then resumed their conversation. A car cruised past, slowing down, and Phin tensed until he figured out they were headed for Hugo to buy drugs.

  Keeping alert, Phin walked to the front of the car and checked the tire. It was flat, the rubber beginning to tear from riding on the rim. He squinted down the street, but didn’t notice anything he might have run over.

  He went to the trunk, lifting up the carpet-covered board that hid the spare, and that’s when they hit him.

  It was a smart attack. Phin had the trunk open so he didn’t see them run up, and his hands were occupied with the tire the moment before he was tackled.

  They were fast. But so was Phin.

  He dropped the spare and pulled his gun just as one of the cholos plowed into him. Phin shot twice as he fell backward into the street, dead weight pinning him down, another Mexican coming at him from the right side. Phin fired four more times, center mass, and then two men sat up in the car parked across the street—they’d been hiding—and hurried over to join the fight.

  Phin managed to push the dead guy off of him, emptied his magazine at the duo, sensed movement from behind, and then something hit him in the wrist, the FNS falling from his grasp and clattering to the street. Phin dove away from his attacker, tucked and rolled to his feet, and came up surrounded by four men.

  The snipers hadn’t tried to take him down yet, but Phin suspected that was what had taken out his tire. None of the cholos he faced carried guns. That could only mean one thing; they meant to take Phin alive.

  Well… Phin thought, slipping the brass knuckles on to his left hand and then flicking open the butterfly knife with his right, let them try.

  Two guys rushed Phin at once. He slashed one across the chest, then did a tight spin-kick and caught the other in the jaw. Both stumbled away, and a pipe clipped Phin in the side of the head and sent him off balance and staggering into the middle of the street. He regained his footing, slipped a punch, then countered with a brass knuckle uppercut that broke bone and teeth.

  Phin whirled to face the two Mexicans still on their feet, and saw six more running his way.

  This was a coordinated attack. His odds weren’t good.

  He dared a quick glance at the street, looking for his dropped gun, and then a heavy, muscular dude rushed at Phin’s knife, the man’s shirt balled up in his hand to deflect the blade. Phin raised the weapon, thrusting at the man’s face, missing, and the other guy stepped in and popped Phin in the ear, hard enough to rock him sideways.

  Phin spun, letting centripetal force whip out his hand with the brass knuckles, catching his attacker on the temple, a stream of blood spurting out and following him like the string of a kite.

  Muscles lunged at Phin again, and Phin ducked under the man’s hands, dropped a shoulder, and pushed forward, driving the guy backwards as he stabbed at his side. The cholo fell just as the reinforcements arrived.

  Five down, six to go.

  The fight-or-flight adrenaline surge still strong, Phin planted a boot in one man’s chest, and elbowed another in the chin.

  Two guys rushed him, and Phin stepped away but someone he’d dropped earlier reached out and snagged his ankle.

  Phin went down.

  Three men jumped on top of him.

  Phin felt a rib snap, tried to roll away, but two more bodies piled on. Another rib went, and Phin’s fight for survival became a fight to breathe as all of the weight on him squashed his diaphragm. Pinned immobile under the stack of bodies, the edges of Phin’s vision became fuzzy from the lack of oxygen. Then he felt a jab in the arm, and the blackness overtook him.

  LUCY

  Somewhere in Mexico

  She limped up to the threshold and peered inside.

  K called it the throne room.

  The walls were stone. K had insisted on gray, like a medieval castle, but nothing in this country was gray. He’d settled for light brown adobe, topped by a sloppy coat of charcoal paint the cartel had splashed around with the finesse of men who sold drugs for a living.

  There was a single window, squarish and barely big enough to stick your head through, overlooking the fighting arena two floors below. At night, the only light came courtesy of greasy oil lamps hanging from chains, yellow and sickly and not much brighter than candles. Electric light was impossible; when K converted the room he’d bricked over the electrical outlets and fixtures. Every time Lucy entered the room it took a few seconds for her eye to adjust to the darkness.

  K preferred darkness. He wrapped himself in it like a vampire in a cape.

  Lucy didn’t knock before entering the throne room; she couldn’t because there was no door, only an arched entryway. She was the only one K allowed inside, and every single time she found him in the same position. Seated at a ratty, stained, purple throne leftover from some second-rate 1970s theater production of King Lear. It was huge, with a high back, and K was always slumped in it, perfectly still, looking small, eyes wide and staring at nothing, his labored, keening wheeze the only proof he was still alive.

  The cartel called him El Cometa. Lucy had taken to calling him K, and he hadn’t objected.

  Others knew him as Luther Kite.

  She walked up the scrap of maroon runner to the foot of his throne, proprietarily bowed as deeply as her wrecked back could bend, and then searched his eyes to see if he’d noticed her arrival.

  His gaze remained vacant. Lucy couldn’t tell if it was the Tussin, or something else. K’s pale countenance hadn’t darkened a bit in the Mexicali weather; if anything it had become more translucent. The hair he had left was patchy, graying. Looking at him, Lucy sometimes felt like she was staring at an old black and white film.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, surprising her. “About pain.”

  It was a subject they both knew intimately well. From the delivery end, and as captive recipients.

  “What about it, K?”

  She leaned in, smelling lemon candy on his breath; a habit he’d been unable to break even though the part of his tongue that tasted sour had been long ago skinned off.

  “The end to our pain is coming, Lucy. Soon.”

  “How?”

  “Why not death rather than living torment?”

  Lucy hated when he talked like that. Quoting old, cryptic shit.

  “Death? That’s the end of our pain?”

  “Death is the end of everything. And it closes in on us.”

  “Are you ill, K?”

  K’s eyes snapped into focus and pinned her. “No more than usual. He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf.”

  Lucy sighed, overly dramatic. “More Shakespeare. I hate that guy.”

  “When I was captive, sometimes he let me read. Shakespeare. Old mystery magazines, with pages ripped out so I never knew how the stories ended. Once, because it amused him, an Italian crime novel. That was my sole entertainment for an entire year. I can’t speak Italian, but I read every word. I read the Shakespeare, too. It made about as much sense as the Italian. But sometimes, those wretched lines get stuck.” He poked a boney finger at his temple. “The Bard is lucky he died four hundred years ago, because I would love to cut him into tiny bits and make him eat himself, piece by piece.”

  Lucy allowed the image to worm itself into her brain. Where to cut first. How big the slices should be. “Sounds fun. We should try something like that.”

  “Maybe. I have another idea. From something I read.”

  The warmth she was feeling dissipated, and Lucy suppressed a groan. “Let me guess. Shakespeare.”

  “No. Hitchcock. Let’s go to the playroom.”

  Lucy brightened. “Now you’re talkin’, K.”

  K pulled himself up to his feet, using his scepter as a cane. The skull atop the staff wasn’t real; a ceramic souvenir for tourists to buy on Día de Muertos. The gold shaft was also fake, the met
allic paint flaking off, the colored jewels made of glass. But the hair atop the skull, dark and matted and glued there like a fright wig, was a real human scalp.

  Lucy knew it was real, because she and K had taken it from its previous owner as he begged for mercy they didn’t have.

  The duo walked into the hallway, and the faux castle motif continued, albeit sloppily. The walls weren’t adobe, but rather stucco painted to look like stone. There were electric lights, hanging on the low ceiling—original fixtures dating from when the building had been converted into a hotel in the 1950s. K had replaced the bulbs with the kind that flickered like orange candles.

  They took the stairs slow, using the railings. Lucy hated stairs. It was painful enough getting around on level surfaces, but something about up-and-down movement ignited her raw nerve endings like cattle-prod shocks to her spine. She clenched the teeth she had left and weathered the pain. When they reached the bottom, some cartel asshole was sitting on the last three steps, smoking a cigarette, his ear buds spitting out tinny ranchero music. He didn’t notice they were above him until K poked him with his scepter.

  The cholo turned, his expression morphing from irritated to spooked in half a heartbeat. It reminded Lucy of a Loony Tunes cartoon character, eyes popping out in surprise.

  “Lo siento, El Cometa,” he sputtered, quickly getting out of the way and hurrying down the corridor.

  On the first floor, the décor was no longer Halloween/medieval, and instead reflected what the building actually was; a renovated mission, built in the 1800s. K stopped at his room, and like the majority of rooms in the crumbling hotel it was cramped, hot, and stank of age. Perched on K’s bed was a medium-sized cardboard box. He handed Lucy his scepter and picked it up.

  “Dropped off this morning,” K said. “A new toy to play with.”

  Lucy noted that the box was labeled Amazon, and her hopes dimmed. Even though Amazon claimed to be The Everything Store, she doubted they sold torture paraphernalia, rare weapons, or interrogation equipment. Whatever K had planned for the playroom was probably going to be lame.

  As with any other addiction, it was possible to develop a tolerance to sadism. When Lucy had first met K, she’d been a teenager and had just killed her first man. At the time, K collected antique surgical tools, and each terrible instrument they’d tried upped her level of excitement.

  Lithotomes, scarificators, tonsil guillotines.

  A vintage speculum made of wrought iron that could be heated on a stovetop until it glowed.

  Artificial leeches.

  Everything was so exciting back then. To get the same high these days, Lucy needed things to be even uglier. Messier. More extreme.

  But what was the worst thing that could be in an Amazon box? Some overpriced hardcover books and a lint roller?

  She eyed the package again. No bigger than a breadbox.

  Shit, maybe it was a breadbox. Lucy wouldn’t be surprised. Lately, K had been…

  Slipping was the wrong word.

  Fading? Losing interest?

  Going mad?

  When they’d first arrived at the compound, over a year ago, Lucy had felt like a dysfunctional kid in a candy store. She’d always been a nomad, and took her fix on the road when she could find it. That meant passing up a lot of potential opportunities for safety’s sake. Killing in public required a certain situational awareness. She could never truly lose herself in a messy death while worrying if the cops were around the next corner. And in a day and age where everyone had a cell phone with a high resolution camera, it had become almost impossible to indulge in her particular tastes while remaining invisible.

  South of Mexicali, in this blood-soaked sanctuary known as La Juntita, there were no such worries. Lucy could take her time, really enjoy the moment. Not only were they safe, but they were being protected and getting paid for their skills.

  Those early times in the compound had been fun. She and K had done everything—imaginable and unimaginable—to cause human beings pain. Highlights included:

  Building a working iron maiden.

  Frying a mother, father, and their two children in a giant pot of lard.

  Ling Chi, also known as the death of a thousand cuts (actually, it took a thousand two hundred and four.)

  A pair of iron boots that could be locked onto feet, with holes for molten lead to be poured inside.

  Strappado, mazzatello, flaying, even a blood eagle (the back slashed open, ribs broken off the spine, and the lungs pulled out to resemble bird wings.)

  And her all-time favorite; the blowtorch toilet, which worked pretty much like it sounded.

  Those were in the playroom. In the arena, they’d come up with many other wicked forms of execution that paying spectators could wager on.

  Drawn and quartered by ATVs, betting on which limb would detach first.

  Crucifixions.

  Impalings on long, steel rods.

  The living necklace (four men with a thick rope threaded through their bellies, playing a disemboweling game of tug o’ war.)

  A naked footrace over hot coals.

  It had been glorious.

  Lately, things hadn’t been so glorious. K’s last attempt at a spectacular death was a man locked in a cage with a hundred rats. In that case, the crowd had almost died… of boredom. The rats had ignored the man, and he eventually died of exposure or thirst or something equally boring.

  And K’s current method of punishing the cartel’s enemies was a Columbian necktie; slitting the throat and pulling the tongue out of the hole. Not very bloody, not very painful, and over much too quickly.

  Luther Kite used to terrify Lucy, with his nature and with his legend.

  But the man she called K…

  K was a crippled, pale image of his former self.

  Where was the bloodlust? Where was the creativity?

  Lucy remembered when D…

  D.

  Donaldson.

  There was a serial murderer who died at the top of his game. A killer’s killer. D kept his edge to the very end.

  Lucy had been born without the ability to care about anything other than herself. But sometimes she found herself missing the old fella. They’d been through a lot together. And they’d shared a bond closer than anything she’d ever shared with Luther.

  Lucy could hear someone wailing in pain; they were nearing the playroom. But it didn’t excite her like it should have.

  She was too busy thinking about D. Maybe, someday, she’d see him again.

  But only if hell really existed.

  DONALDSON

  Phoenix

  Hell was real, and it was called Arizona.

  The oversized red hoodie was like wearing a sauna in the hundred-plus heat, and it attracted almost as much attention from passerby as Donaldson’s exaggerated limp.

  But not as much attention as he would have gotten if the hoodie was off.

  As usual, he was in constant pain. The parts of him that hadn’t been scraped bare, burned, stabbed, or whittled down to bone, had been shot. But he hadn’t been identified during his extended hospital stay, even though he’d talked to countless cops about the Michigan ordeal. Donaldson stuck to lies, about both his previous injuries and his current ones, and feigned amnesia for much of his time in intensive care. Incredibly, they’d allowed him to walk out of there (well, limp out of there) when they’d deemed him healthy enough.

  So the serial killer who’d lost track of how many he’d actually killed was free to do so once again.

  Except, seriously, who could bear to kill anyone in this horrible heat? How did anything at all get done in Phoenix? What fool thought it was a smart idea to build a city in the middle of a desert?

  Donaldson hobbled up to the massive glass and concrete edifice that was the front of the Burton Barr Central Library, blinded by the sun reflecting off five stories of windows, and entered on the west side.

  The air conditioning hit him like a slap, and he passed a handsome male guard in slack
s and a polo. The guard glanced at Donaldson, trying and failing to hide his revulsion.

  I’ve raped and tortured and murdered men bigger, stronger, and prettier than you.

  It was a pleasant thought, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. Donaldson couldn’t remember the last time he’d killed for sport. Or for any reason. His latest crime spree, which was lame by any self-respecting maniac’s standards, involved stealing a car from a woman who left it running when she went into a convenience store, and taking the wallet off a drunk passed out in a tavern parking lot. He’d also tried, and failed, to shoplift food on four different occasions. His appearance and gait made it impossible to be inconspicuous, and he’d been caught and told to leave three of those times. On the fourth, the clerk felt sorry for him and told him to keep the snack cakes he’d tried to pilfer. Which was even more humiliating than getting caught.

  In some ways, helplessness was even worse than pain.

  Donaldson headed for the glass elevator at the south end of the building, standing next to a child who was waiting. A little girl of no more than five or six. She stared directly at Donaldson’s scarred face. Donaldson saw revulsion there, something he’d gotten used to. But he also saw something else.

  Fear.

  And it felt good to be feared again.

  “I’m going to come to your house tonight,” Donaldson said to her, keeping his voice low. “And I’m going to cut up your mommy and daddy with a knife and eat their guts. Next, I’ll slice off your face. Then you’ll look… Just. Like. Me.”

  Donaldson watched her fear become full-fledged terror, watched her shorts soak with urine, and then she ran off, screaming.

  Donaldson glanced over his shoulder, saw he’d caught the guard’s attention. He shrugged, as if to say, “It’s not my fault the kid got frightened by my sad appearance.”

  The guard turned away. Donaldson climbed into the elevator, alone.

  He got out on the second floor, pulling out the stolen wallet and finding the previous owner’s library card, and using it to reserve Internet time on one of the many public computers. He sat down, which was painful enough to cause him to gasp, and then got onto Google.